It seems that most of what I've been doing the last few days consists of "looking" ~ looking at sales reports, ad results (well, for the one place that provides them), staring at more "opt-ins" from Voracious Readers Only (seven new ones today). If I don't count the new dump of ARC readers, all the news is bad. And, by the way, I don't consider VRO results as good anymore.
As I previously noted, my BookBub ad resulted in no clicks over the two days it ran. I received a survey from them, asking about my recent experience. I answered honestly. No, I wasn't satisfied with my experience. No, I probably won't use them again. No, there's nothing they can improve. It's not their fault. They do what they do. It works for some authors, but not for others. I'm certainly not weeping over it.
I sold one copy of Inn Dreams yesterday. So dumb. Promoting, I mean. Those testimonials that the various promo sites tout? Ever wonder why there's ever only five or six of them? Because that's the total number of authors who manage to strike gold using their services.
On the plus side, I only (?) received four "unsubscribes" so far from my newsletter that went out yesterday. And one person even entered my ebook giveaway. That makes a grand total of two engagements over the seven months I've been sending these out.
That said, my CTA for book reviews resulted in none. I am disappointed that the one person who emailed me directly, telling me how much she loved Inn Dreams, never bothered to post the review she'd promised.
No one new has posted a review, not on Amazon or Goodreads. I'm still stuck at two.
The book is live on LibraryThing's giveaway. 180 books being given away this month! I had to scroll forever to even find mine; at first I thought they'd failed to include it. I've got eight entries, which is really awful. Other books have over two hundred. I'm not sure what people base their entries on; I read the descriptions of some of the books with fewer entries than mine and they sounded interesting! Apparently I am a terrible judge of readers' tastes.
I did play around with creating a new cover for Second Chance. I found an image I really, really like, but the text placement is tricky. I mocked up four different covers with the same image and maybe I'll be satisfied with one of them. For some reason having a cover spurs me on to finish a book. That, plus I'd love to switch Inn Dreams out with this book on VRO, because my ARC reader totals are completely out of hand.
Right now it feels like I'm playing a game to see how poorly I can do on all counts ~ sales, readers, reviews. I'm winning!
I will say that it's nice to take a breather from writing. There are a couple ways I can go with Second Chance, and I'm not crazy about either option. What I meant to say is, there are a couple of ways I've considered going. I'm quite sure better ones exist. I do like the drama of the MC packing up, giving up her rented domicile and leaving town. She'd eventually come back, of course. The bad part about that option is, I would need to describe her new life to some extent, about which I know nothing. Maybe I could Google, "a day in the life of...", but probably nothing like that exists online. What's appealing about this choice is being able to show how unglamorous that lifestyle actually is, as opposed to what most people think.
Or I just keep her in town, but dang, the small town trope is kind of worn out by now and something would need to happen to maintain interest.
Or I just don't think about it for now. I like that option the best.
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